[liberationtech] Berkman's Circumvention Tool Usage Report

[Hal Roberts]

Thanks for the great summary, Danny.

I can't think off the top of my head of how to measure your sense of 
variability, but I don't think I agree with your guess.  We have been 
tracking this for some time, and the same handful of simple web proxies 
have been sitting at the top of the list for a long time (years).  One 
of our most surprising findings for us was the web proxy in china that 
has been been operating unblocked for over two years with roughly the 
same number of users as tor or ultrasurf or freegate.  Likewise, we know 
of another example of a web proxy that has been used by hundreds of 
thousands of people in a single country since that country chose one of 
the core web 2.0 sites.  My intuition (with no backing data) is that 
there are constant, loyal users of those proxies just as with the other 
tools, though maybe users for more cute cat and less political purposes 
(or maybe not).

We really, really, really don't like hiding any of our data.  We would 
love to release all of the underlying data we collected for the report. 
  But we had to think hard about even releasing the report in its 
current "coy" (ouch!) state, because one possible outcome is that China 
and other filtering countries will now use the relatively simple methods 
described in our paper to start blocking proxy tools more aggressively.

Why many filtering countries have not already done so is a great mystery 
of this field, but our standing hypothesis is that blocking decisions 
are usually more political than technical and therefore driven by which 
tools are viewed by the political decision makers as enemies of the 
state -- thus the hugely aggressive blocking of gifc tools in China for 
instance.  Unfortunately, the Berkman Center is itself a political 
entity in some filtering states now, so merely mentioning a tool by name 
in one of our reports is possibly / likely enough to move it onto the 
enemy-of-the-state-block list.

The filtering company vpn is a border case.  We left the name out mainly 
out of general principle of not disclosing the name of any service that 
is not part of the handful of already very well know big services (tor, 
ultrasurf, freegate, hotspot).  We'll go back and ponder whether we 
should release their identity separately.

-hal

On 10/18/10 8:28 PM, Danny O'Brien wrote:
> http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/publications/2010/Circumvention_Tool_Usage
>
> (For those for whom 13 pages is TL;DR, there's also good summary at http://www.technologyreview.com/web/26574/ with comments from many of libtech's most Esteemed And Usual Suspects)
>
> Great read, with actual data and carefully described methodologies for how that data was gathered.  I for one spent slightly too much time after reading the paper exploring https://www.google.com/adplanner/ and  http://www.google.com/insights/  (eg the regional interest stats for http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=facebook+proxy&cmpt=q and http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=proxy&cmpt=q are both fascinating.). Of course, the Berkman folk warn everyone to take their estimates with a heavy pinch of salt, but it's nice to find some research that has something other than salt as an ingredient :)
>
> The big quotable conclusion is that circumvention usage is small (Berkman estimated<3%, even in heavily filtered countries). I don't think that would come as much of a surprise to anyone here. The real meat for me was in the relative usage of circumvention tools/web proxies/VPNs and http proxies, with web proxies coming out a bigger winner than I would have guessed, both in terms of their penetration and the lack of blocking by filtering states.
>
> My hasty, fact-free analysis: while I don't doubt that 3% figure, I wonder if web proxy predominance points to a wider *variability* in circumvention usage. Web proxies are convenient and easy for accessing the occasional blocked site, as opposed to VPNs and circumvention tools which assume continuous use. I can imagine that such knowledge once used once becomes a unexercised but everpresent skill among those who have needed it in the past. That would depress monthly usage numbers, but would allow for large jumps in circumvention if/when a controversial topic is blocked.
>
> It's also not clear to me how widespread circumvention needs to be  before the policy goals of introducing filtering are undermined. It may be that for most topics that would be traditionally censored *and* are of potentially widespread interest, like corruption stories, strikes or protests, or opposition declarations, just a few users obtaining the information and then spreading it through unblocked routes is just as effective as widespread circumvention tool usage.
>
> Finally, the Berkman folk were very coy, but I'd still love to know what VPN company it is who also runs a filtering blacklist service.. As the paper says, "we leave as an exercise for the reader [the act of] deciphering the considerable value for a filtering company of running its own circumvention system."
>
> d.
> _______________________________________________
> liberationtech mailing list
> liberationtech at lists.stanford.edu
>
> Should you need to change your subscription options, please go to:
>
> https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech